


Not Down On Any Map

by zuzeca



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Beast Wars, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Shipwrecked, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Animal Instincts, Beast Mode Sex, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Desert Island Fic, Enemy Mine - Freeform, Geographical Isolation, Hunters & Hunting, IN SPACE!, M/M, Memories, Mutual Pining, Negotiations, Nostalgia, Ocean, Ocean Sex, Other, Tentacles, Wilderness Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-09-24 12:36:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20358622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zuzeca/pseuds/zuzeca
Summary: When Thundertron and his Star Seekers converge with deadly force upon a battle between Autobots and Decepticons, Megatron and Optimus find themselves shipwrecked and separated on a far-flung and desolate planet. Half-dead and cut off from their respective forces, subject to the elements and wildlife of this strange and watery world, the only way to survive may be to don the alien shapes of its denizens.Reshaped and reborn in strange hybrids of metal and organic flesh, Megatron and Optimus strive to rejoin the battle, and take revenge on Thundertron. But their new forms present new challenges, isolation brings with it unwelcome memories, and as the days stretch on with no sign of rescue, meaning begins to slip away, and strange longing to take its place...





	Not Down On Any Map

**Author's Note:**

> Hello All, this is my entry for the TF Big Bang! Yes it's a MegOp castaway AU. Simple yes, but mayhaps with...hidden depths? |D Featuring illustrations by the kindly and talented xenotechnophile (on [Tumblr](https://xenotechnophile.tumblr.com/post/187270101001/not-down-on-any-map-by-zuzeca-i-was-super-glad-to/)) and shapeofmetal (on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/metal_shape/status/1165374375488409600?s=20) and [Tumblr](https://shapeofmetal.tumblr.com/post/187242642554/my-contribution-to-tfbigbang-for-zuzecas-aka)). Please check out their artwork!
> 
> And many thanks to everyone who cheered me on as I ground through this from under a mountain of work, including my beloved Reyairia for beta and for being generally tolerant of and amused at my whining as I struggled to wrangle these two emotionally constipated gay robots. <3

_ “It is not down on any map; true places never are.” — Herman Melville, Moby Dick _

* * *

The deck of the _ Ark _lurched beneath Optimus's feet as another blast rocked the ship, sending him staggering into a bulkhead. Beside him, Megatron cursed and struggled to keep his footing.

“Running again, Optimus?” Megatron spat, much of the threat of his words diminished as he was forced to drive his sword into a wall to keep from toppling. “I told you, no force in the universe will keep me from—” A wayward storage crate struck him full in the face, cutting him off, and the ship gave an alarming buck.

“Since you seem to be unable to comprehend the reality of the situation,” Optimus shouted back above the roar of plasma cannon fire and the shriek of metal components ripping to shreds. “We have far larger problems than your substantial grudge.”

_ “Optimus!” _ Arcee’s voice cut across the commlink. _ “Thundertron’s troops have breached deck two!” _

_ “Let Bumblebee and the other light infantry heckle them,” _ said Optimus. _ “Focus on freeing us from the grapplers.” _ Batting away a bit of flying debris, he said aloud, “Megatron, what is the status of your Decepticons?”

“Ha!” said Megatron. “Trying to grind me for information, Optimus? Your pious act won't work!”

“My deepest apologies,” said Optimus. He ducked to avoid a datapad whizzing past. “You have seen through my ploy. I only wished to know where I can expect to be imprisoned in the near future, and whether you will be joining me in the cell.”

Megatron scowled, as he always did when he'd figured out Optimus was taking the used oil out of him. This expression had changed little from the ones he'd frequently directed at Orion in the arena, or across the tables at the Hall of Records, and it sent a small, incongruous pain across Optimus's spark.

“Engaged with Thundertron’s troops,” said Megatron, his tone peevish. “They have been pushed down from the upper decks.”

“Can the _ Nemesis _ free itself?” said Optimus, his battle computer churning, running thousands of calculations.

Megatron looked almost embarrassed. “No,” he said. “Soundwave indicates our own grapplers are tangled with those of the _ Tidal Wave _.”

“I see,” said Optimus. “It must frustrate you to have another predator snatch your prey from your very jaws.”

Megatron bared his fangs. “Careful, _ Prime _. Or if I cannot gorge on it, I might content myself with ripping out its throat.”

Optimus did not dignify Megatron's threat with a response, instead pushing himself upright, engaging his commlink to pinpoint his Autobots’ location above him.

“Besides,” Megatron grumbled, sounding sullen. “How was I supposed to know that a band of filthy pirates had taken over Tlalak—”

Something tore through the wall beside them, slicing through the ship’s hull as though it were delicate foil. The nose of the object struck Optimus and he tumbled to the floor, looking up just in time to catch a glimpse of a wide, painted grin, full of sharp fangs, and flat, painted eyes; Thundertron's calling card, the design with which he decorated his bombs.

“Torpedo!” shouted Megatron, and then the world ripped to pieces.

* * *

Optimus fell.

The wind whipped past, burning, the agonizing sear of superheated atmosphere, ripping off plating and exposing sensors, pain signals his processor struggled to transmit. Glowing bits of debris hailed past him like comets. His optics were nearly blinded by heat and light.

He was a war machine, shaped by an ancient god. And now mere air and gravity conspired to tear him apart.

He thought of his Autobots. He thought of Cybertron, a darkened husk spinning through the blackness of the cosmos. He thought of Megatron. 

He wondered—with the part of him still capable of wondering—whether Megatron was also being rent to scrap metal. Whether a thousand megacycles of bitter conflict was now to end in this. No final battle, no looking into Megatron’s optics in those final moments, his own or Megatron’s. 

Just a bomb. And a shipwreck. And a tragedy.

Optimus wondered if there was anyone else in the known universe who would think Megatron’s deactivation such, before agony stole what was left of his thoughts.

Fire and pain and pain and—

He struck something, solid, as crushing and immovable as a freight train, and then he was sinking, plunging into liquid, boiling and roiling around him as he sank.

Salty liquid rushed into his intakes and he closed them, tumbling end over end as gravity continued to claw at him, looping chains around his limbs to drag him down.

He tried to scream, and blacked out.

* * *

Megatron struck the surface of the liquid like a stone, the force ripping loose one of his wingstruts and crumpling his plating as he plunged beneath the waves. He tumbled end over end through the dense medium. He cursed and fought to shift to root mode. After several agonizing attempts, he forced his frame into compliance, unfolding, his limbs thrashing as he clawed his way in the direction his still unbroken gyros informed him was _ surface. _

Megatron's helm breached through the surface and he wheezed liquid from his vents, hacking and swearing. Above him, around him, fire rained down, debris striking the surface of the alien ocean.

His first thought was to hail Soundwave, but his commlink only hissed and spat static, a string of error messages cascading through his processor. Crushed, or burnt, or melted—if he focused, he could feel the globs of molten metal where tiny welds had flash-liquified and rehardened, sparks of tingling pain in his neural net—regardless, it was not working.

He noticed he was beginning to sink again, and kicked out snarling, forcing his frame to rise. Flames lit up the night as something exploded, hundreds of mechanometers above him, a collage of hot reds and yellows and oranges. Between the smoke, debris, and distance, he could not determine which ship it was.

Growling in frustration, he struck out, clawing his way forward in a clumsy crawl. Megatron had never before encountered liquid of this depth or magnitude, but he refused to be stymied by a pathetic, organic substance.

If he could not fly back to the battle, he would swim.

* * *

Darkness. Cold. Pressure which made his plating creak. The muffled and yet surprisingly loud squeak and thump of sound forced through a liquid medium.

Optimus onlined his optics.

At first he feared he'd been blinded by the crash, a noose of panic tightening around his spark, but then he realized he could see, faintly, a small globe of light, emanating from his own optics, a mere candle in the endless dark of the abyss.

His scrambled gyros informed him he was sinking still, the dense liquid slowing his descent to a crawl. Blackness above him, blackness below. His echolocatory abilities were poor, but he sent out a questing ping.

Silence.

Nothing. He pinged again, confused, again heard no echo.

A chill passed through his spark. While rational thought told him no sea could be without bed, it was all too easy to imagine himself falling without end, swallowed by the jaws of an alien ocean.

He kicked out, sending waves of pain through damaged components. He knew the principle behind swimming, but his frame lacked the buoyancy for it, and he only succeeded in sending himself spinning about, like a dancer suspended among dark curtains.

He was sinking, into unknown depths, and he had no means to stop himself.

He thought longingly of Seaspray, one of the few mechanisms Optimus had ever seen with a submersible alt. It rendered Seaspray portly and awkward on land, but he was an unmatched explorer, and his swiftness beneath the waves was without peer.

Optimus was not unaware of the irony, that the commander of all the Autobot forces could so easily be rendered helpless, while a non-combat-equipped mechanism would have made short work of the same problem. If there had been an available vehicle about, he of course would have scanned it, but there were none.

Something moved in the darkness.

He froze, weapons activating, blades unfolding, casting weak blue light around him. He held himself tight, and waited.

Another flicker of movement, a shadow in the inky blackness. In front of him, then gone.

_ Behind you! _

He jerked, blades coming up, spinning to find himself face to face with a giant, gelatinous eye, framed with glowing spots of sickly green.

The creature recoiled, the tentacles trailing from its missile-shaped body lifting and spreading, revealing a curtain of wicked hooks as long as Optimus's digits. A whoosh of water pumped through a huge siphon and the curtain collapsed, the creature diving beneath him and coming back up, circling.

Optimus had never seen such a thing, not even while perusing the travelogues of ancient explorers in the Hall of Records. But monstrous in form as the creature might be, Optimus had learned better than to assume it was non-sentient.

There was something like an ancient, cold intelligence in the massive eye which swiveled to face him, tracking his movements.

“I mean you no harm,” he said. The density of the medium garbled his voice, but he doubted the creature possessed commlinks. Spoken Galactic Standard was his best bet.

It didn't respond, verbally or physically. Optimus raised a hand and attempted a different greeting.

It struck.

Optimus recoiled as the tentacles enveloped him, hooks anchoring in the spaces between the plates of his armor. Something huge and sharp scraped against his chassis, raising a deep gouge in the paint and he lashed back at it, seizing one of the tentacles in a crushing grip.

It went into a convulsion, mats of tentacles writhing and splaying across his face. He fought, felt soft, organic flesh give beneath his fingers.

Half-blind, he thought of Onyx Prime.

The records of the Thirteen had been spotty, ancient, rusted sheets of metal pressed with archaic runes, which Alpha Trion kept stored amongst the poetry archives, but they had been among Orion’s favorites to peruse. He remembered tracing the shining sword of Prima, the spiked armor of Megatronus, the sparks flying from Solus’s hammer.

And the eerie, beastlike visage of Onyx.

_ “Infinite variety, in infinite combinations,” said Alpha Trion, amused. “That is the gift of our creator, Orion. Bend, adapt, transform.” _

Optimus’s optics sprang open, and the green light of his scanners lit the black void of the abyss.

* * *

Swimming for the battle was something which, Megatron began to grudgingly admit after several megacycles of crawling progress, might have been better in theory than in practice. His frame might have been reformatted for flight, but he'd never been able to achieve the streamlined shape of those built for the purpose. He was heavy and solid, made for combat, not distance travel.

And though it galled to acknowledge it, his stamina was not infinite.

The waves of organic liquid broke over his dorsal plating, rushed into his vents. His struts ached from the constant motion, pistons firing again and again and again. His central processor spat warnings of low energy levels and battle damage.

He stopped thrashing, struggling to look above him and get his bearings.

The ships were nowhere in sight. His commlinks were broken and silent. All around him stretched an identical expanse of alien ocean, like an endless, watery desert, and he felt a deep, uncomfortable chill.

He began to sink.

The sunlit waters closed above his helm, optics adjusting to the fluid medium. He drifted onto his back, hands rising as he reached out to touch the receding surface.

A shadow flickered on the periphery of his vision, and he turned.

At first he thought it was one of Thundertron’s torpedos, the blunt missile shape, flat grey surface and gaping maw of razor fangs, but then the tailfins moved, beating rhythmically to propel it through the water, and he realized it was alive.

He gritted his fangs and clamped down on the urge to shoot it. Unless it proved a threat, he would only be wasting his energy. And he was unsure how his cannon might work underwater.

The creature cruised closer and he caught a glimpse of a deep black optic, like a fragment of the fabric of deep space, rolling in the creature’s helm as it observed him.

He considered shooting it anyway, but then something gave him pause.

The monstrous thing was clearly shaped for this environment in a way his own frame was not. Perhaps, for all it seemed to be composed of weak, organic tissue, it could prove some use.

The creature circled closer and he watched it. It was clearly curious at his presence, making probing passes as if seeking something. With each turn it made past him, fast, hairpin turns, he could feel faint electrical fluctuations, riding along the creature’s skin, in the flex of its muscles. He passed his arm through the water, slowly, before it.

The creature lunged. Jaws opened to seemingly unfathomable width, and bone squealed on metal as it clamped rows of razor teeth around his arm. It bit with crushing force. The kind of force which could maim or kill in a sparkpulse.

If he’d been an organic, that is.

He watched the creature thrash against him, teeth sliding on his forearm guard and leaving weals in the metal. He felt the urge to kill it for its presumption, and yet there was something admirable in the mindless aggression, in the way the creature was perfectly shaped to inhabit its watery world.

It would serve very well.

Catching up the creature in a brutal embrace, relishing the way it fought for freedom, Megatron bared his own fangs, and engaged his scanners.

* * *

Millennia prior, Optimus had felt the unnatural pain of reconstruction, as his body bent to the will of a consciousness older and vaster than his own. Now he felt his frame twist, bowing to blind, unthinking chains of chemical acids, their links as delicate and frail as mesh, yet their power inexorable. His limbs stretched, split, divided, then divided again. His frame burned, as if hot from the forge. He twisted, still falling through that black and endless abyss, and he clawed at the creature, at the icy water, as if he could bring it to himself and cool his blistering chassis. He writhed, groping out as he felt his limbs dissolve and reform.

A siphonous opening wrenched itself open in his metal hide, and he took his first, burning gasp of seawater.

The liquid rushed along joints and seams, over closed systems, bleeding heat from his frame and he could have cried out with relief. Slick, organic flesh shredded beneath his fingers; he tore the creature’s tentacles from their roots. The blueprint of the monster’s consciousness swelled beneath his own, star-brilliant, a nebula of visual and sensory data. Vision bled into his optical sensors, cruel, curving hooks burst from his superstructure, a cavity opened in his faceplates, tessellating into wicked, interlocking points.

Optimus bellowed a silent challenge to the abyss, and tore into flesh that tasted of seawater.

They writhed within that pocket, crushing pressure, colder and blacker and more silent than the vacuum of deep space. He bit, devoured, cannibalizing, filling his tanks with matter to be rendered into energy, blood on his beak and copper on his tongue. His body broke, exoskeletal plates riding over each other like the tectonic movement of the seafloor, shreds of flesh raining around him in a blizzard of marine snow.

He locked into a new shape, tentacles twisting into a spear point to reduce drag, and took off into the darkness.

* * *

  


At first, Megatron wondered if he had not made a mistake. His frame seemed to balloon as it strove to match the creature’s shape, his limbs vanishing into nothingness, carved and cut to nubs, his digits stiffening and merging into clumsy paddles. Exoskeletal plates parted, water rushing into his mouth and throat, only to be exhausted as he gulped and spat the salt from his tongue. He lost control of his legs and feet; his stern-heavy body tipped forward and began to sink into the depths.

Nevertheless, he persisted.

As he descended through the water, beams of filtered sunlight plunging past him into the dark abyss below, his frame gave a seismic twitch. The sharp, paddle-like structure which had formed itself of his hind limbs pushed hard against the water, sending him spiraling off in one direction. Disconcerted, he twitched the limb in the other direction, then back the way it had come.

There was a rhythm to it, he realized, now etched old and timeless into the circuitry of his brain module, as if it had always been there. He repeated the motion, beating against the water in his slow freefall. A rhythm, like the lift and strike of the miner’s pick.

He snarled voiceless into the ocean and lost the motion, sending him flailing off course while he spat and raged with blind resentment. But at last he came to his senses and let the rhythm take him. This body knew how to propel itself, and while it galled him to submit to such primal and mindless instincts, he was out of his depth, so to speak. His tail beat the water, and miracle of miracles, he began to move _ forward _as well as down.

He strove against the drag of the liquid medium, pushing onwards until at last he leveled out and could begin to ascend. Water rushed into his mouth and passed over those strange slits that had ripped themselves into his superstructure, cool and strange, but implanting a deep sense of rightness in the primitive kernel of knowledge that now existed within his new frame.

Emboldened, he forged forward into the deep, blue emptiness. He would find Optimus. He would find the battle. And he would make Thundertron pay.

* * *

The light from above made his new alt mode’s optics react negatively, but Optimus pressed on, rising through the dark and cold layers to linger upon the edges of the water column where distance visibility was vastly improved.

It wasn’t easy, the icy, driven kernel which governed the creature’s thoughts vastly preferred the dark and cold. Light brought strange prickles across the surface of his newly slick superstructure that spoke of _ danger _ and formed non-verbal echoes which reminded Optimus, uncomfortably of the wickedly pointed dental structures with which Megatron had lined his mouth, when he’d chosen to have himself remade as a weapon of war.

The memory of the first time Megatron had first used them upon him was etched deep into Optimus’s neural module. They’d been grappling, hand to hand, already a more visceral, physical dance than the hot burn of blaster and cannon, or even the clash of blade. Optimus had gained the upper hand, for just a moment, bending joint and armor as he forced Megatron towards the twice-baked earth of their dancefloor, the strange, desert world upon which they’d found themselves.

It was in that moment that Megatron’s helm had shot forward, fangs bared, and he’d sunk those sharp structures into the cables of Optimus’s throat. Pain had flared, hot and shocking. Energon spilled, perfuming the atmosphere, and Optimus had _ roared _.

The memories after that were...confused, disturbing. A strange, red rage had suffused him and he remembered striking, tearing, grappling and thrashing atop a moving frame as though he could grind it to dust, Megatron giving back in kind. Megatron’s field had been hot, nearly giddy, rife with harmonics of _ want _ with which Optimus was familiar, but never from this source, never in this context, and never at this pitch.

It had only been the explosion of a shell, striking ground near them and raining shrapnel and torrents of sand, which had broken them apart.

The image of Megatron’s face, mouth stained and facial plating adorned with Optimus’s energon, red optics alight with battlefire and something that made Optimus’s spark twist in his chassis, had haunted his recharge for joors after the last grains of sand had worked themselves from the gears and hydraulics of Optimus’s frame.

Optimus shook off the memory, his tentacles flaring out wide at the mental disturbance. A threat display, he realized. The tentacles were not merely limbs. Every extension was lined with exquisitely wired and insulated neural connections, each linked to his central core. Not merely receptive, receivers of data; they moved as extensions of his will and emotional state. This frame had its own language, its own intelligence. Upon which he might have to rely if he wished to escape this strange, liquid world.

Speaking of which, was there even any solid ground? Oh he suspected that if he’d continued down into the abyss of blackness and crushing pressure, he’d had eventually touched some kind of substrate. Orbital scans had revealed nothing so fanciful as an endless black hole at the center of the planet, for all the old stories liked to fantasize. But was there ground above?

Optimus girded himself, drew in water through the crude, hydraulic system upon which his new frame relied, and breached the edge of the abyss.

His sensors registered the increasing warmth and light almost immediately. He strove upwards, rising through the water column. He pulsed and rose, propelled by siphonous jets, constant and determined, scaling halocline and thermocline alike.

The moment he broke surface was nearly a shock. The sensation of air on his new superstructure was alarming, cold and desiccating enough to send negative sensory feedback through his new neural net. He plunged back beneath the waves, wrestling with his new frame.

It associated sensations like _ air _ and _ dry _ with death and that alien concept of suffocation. But Optimus pushed back, imposing logic and reason. Surface was where he could scan for allies, search for his Autobots, escape.

Allies? His new frame had no context for this. It understood food. It understood rivals and mates, both categories for which—to Optimus’s vast discomfort—it willingly linked to bloody memories of Megatron. But it was solitary, not a social hunter, and did not build large groups with which to interact.

It did not understand loneliness, but Optimus, caught in the haze of its mental state, caught in the memory-not-memory of the black wastes, stretching as a trackless mirror over a bone-white, watery desert, saw a dark horror yawning. The horror of traveling forever, the extended silence, without ever encountering another creature, and yet perpetually surrounded by the pulse of life, the distant echoing hum of the endless swarm, devouring and disseminating and dying, over and over again.

The mnemonic echo cut deep, tangling with memories of his cycles hooked into the Net. Listen and record, listen and record, never speaking, never touching, never looking into another’s optics and seeing joy or sadness, or anything at all, until his digits and neural net bled from the cuts of the datalines. Of curling into the darkness of an empty berth, half sick of shadows.

Anger curled within him, bubbling, strange and hot in the face of his new frame’s icy acceptance and stimulus-response understanding. He forced himself back to the surface, thrusting his new tentacles into the atmosphere. His new frame fell silent, and he felt a surge of triumph.

Then claws the size of his integrated blades bit into his superstructure, and he was dragged from the water.

* * *

Finding the battle proved, not impossible, Megatron refused to consider such a word, but...challenging.

The rhythm of the creature’s swimming was strangely easy, the motion spare and elegant, meant, he realized, to be perpetual. He even had sonar, once he’d recalibrated to account for the density of liquid medium and rewired components to force his new neural core to be able to synthesize the data. This form had its own tracking system, but it was entirely passive, chemical and electrical receptors which relied upon scent and the vibrations of other moving objects.

He punched out with his recalibrated sonar, sending out a stream of sound into the vast, blue desert. Listened for an echo. Waited. Waited.

Nothing.

Snarling, he banked hard and struck again. Turned as the needle of a compass, slashing across the invisible, magnetic lines of the poles. He bellowed into the void, again, again.

Only silence returned.

As loath as he was to admit it, the thought that swam through him was chilling. The thought that there might be only this, only ocean, that the noisy, hot expanse of space might pale in comparison to the emptiness of this place. He needed…no, he needed nothing. He _ desired _ a place to haul out, where he could see the stars and get his bearings. Where he could dry his circuits and clean his wounds.

His new frame, to his shock, understood him. The kernel of innate knowledge echoed back to him thoughts of warmth and shallow waters, ripe with prey, the heavy feelings in the midsection of being swollen with pup. A tranquil sensation which gripped his own memories, jolting him back to a crystalline moment which he’d never meant to exhume.

_ Orion’s archival booth at the Hall of Records had been warm, but not unpleasantly so. No light but the blue glow of the screens and Orion’s own optics. Orion’s field had tingled against his own, strange and stimulating. He’d held Megatronus’s arm to inspect the slash carved into it by a fellow gladiator, using delicate and clever digits to extract the broken blade fragments and splinters of metal. He’d touched, almost to the point of excess, soothing, his helm bent trustingly in a way that had made Megatronus long to rest his own atop it. When he’d finished, he wiped the excess droplets of energon with his thumb, looked up at Megatronus, and stuck it in his mouth. _

_ Megatronus’s ventilations had stalled. His spark had twisted, pulsing as though it might wrench from his chassis. _

_ “Apologies,” Orion had murmured, as if suddenly realizing what he had done. “I didn’t mean to...to presume.” _

_ He had wanted to tell Orion no no, never presumption. Had wanted to offer the seeping wound and watch Orion lap from it. Had wanted to pull Orion into his lap and enter him, pull them down on the desk and beg Orion to enter him. The conflicting thoughts had paralyzed him, left him dangling on the edge of something unknown and unimaginable. _

_ Instead he’d swallowed back the words unborn in his vocalizer. “It’s alright,” he’d said gruffly, because he’d known not what else to say. _

With an explosion of movement, Megatron struck out, tail beating against the dense curtain of the water as though launching from the ground. He no longer thought of sonar, of mapping, of rational expedition. He picked a direction at random, and took off, crushing into oblivion the small part of him which wondered if he’d come full circle. 

If he’d been reborn beneath the surface, and now he might die beneath it.

* * *

Optimus bled.

He clawed at the grip of the creature’s talons, ripping open his superstructure and leaking energon as he struggled. Sinew knotted around him, scaly skin riding against metal as he sank his newfound hooks into organic flesh. Above him, a screech split the air, deafening his audio sensors.

Below him, the brilliant blue water, capped with white foam, was rapidly descending. The light blinded his new eyes and the sudden transition to dry air made it feel as if he’d been flayed alive, his mechanosensors screaming that this was _ wrong wrong wrong. _

Knotting his tentacles around the parts of the creature’s body which he could reach, he contracted, dragging the thickest part of it towards him. Blood, hot and bright green, poured down on him, splattering across his skin and getting in his eyes. The creature fought him and he strove to control his new body’s instinctive panic. He burrowed against the strange, fluffy material that coated the creatures body, pressing in close, until he could feel the thunder of its organic homolog to his own fuel pump, thundering in his audio sensors.

Anchoring himself in place, he transformed.

He couldn’t accomplish it entirely, trapped as he was in the tunnel of the creature’s claws. But several of his tentacles twined together, forming his arms, hands, fingers.

He clutched at the creature’s body, and engaged his blades.

The scream sent his helm to buzzing and fritzed one of his audio sensors. He snarled and dug his blades in more deeply.

The creature released him and there was a sickening jolt as his half-transformed frame dropped, only to be brought up short by the grip of his own tentacles, hands, limbs. His mind, split between blinding fear and a nearly predatory desire to strike back, felt fractured.

Wind whipped around them as the creature dropped, huge wings raising a maelstrom. Out of the corner of his visual field, Optimus glimpsed a light blob, multiple colors bleeding together like something churned out by the frenzied, mysterious artists who used to leave impressionist murals in the tunnels below the streets of Iacon. He squirmed for freedom, his half-deconstructed limbs unable to coordinate. Everything tasted of the creature’s blood. The shapes below them were getting closer.

They hit, and the force drove all thought from Optimus’s helm.

The impact sent up a huge spray of sediment, the creature’s death throes kicking up wet sand and scattering vegetation. Its weight ground Optimus into the substrate, grinding the large particles into his superstructure and forcing it into his joints. It shrieked again, shuddered, and then went still.

When he found he could move again, Optimus gathered his thoughts, and forced his body through the motions of transformation.

It wasn’t easy. The pressure of the creature’s corpse made it more like trying to transform inside a collapsed tunnel. Exactly like that in fact. Sand forced its way into his vents and he flailed about beneath the creature, pushing to see if he could heave it off him and finally, when this failed, clawing scoops from the soft sediment and wriggling from beneath it.

The sun beat down on his plating, warming it, leaving behind salt deposits in joints and wiring. The coarse, bone white sand stuck to him from all angles. He cleared his vents and blinked against the bright light.

The surface which he occupied was small, from every angle the blue water visible, nothing more than a heap of sand capped with a cluster of vegetation. But ground it was, and where there was some, there must be more. He sent out a burst with his short range scanners, but detected nothing. No other Cybertronians, of any faction, and no organic life bigger than the size of his fist.

The pocked white sand was being rapidly stained green with the creature’s blood. He considered attempting to roll it into the sea—his readings of monographs on organic life, back in the days of his archival tenure, had indicated that organic flesh was susceptible to breakdown by microorganisms as his own frame was to rust and corrosion—but forced himself to stop and consider. There was no energon here, no materials of any kind, and while the sun was already waking his internal energon collectors, a relict of the eons when his kind walked beneath the rays of a star as close and bright as this, he was injured, and who knew what he might need to survive this strange land until he could find rescue or escape.

He knelt by the carcass, touching at the great, folded wings. They were easily as wide as he was tall, covered with slick-soft structures which overlapped each other, drawing to a point at the most distal end from the creature’s body. He lifted them and found the underside lined with modified versions of the same, only smaller and softer. He sifted his fingers through the structures, and lifted his gaze to scan the sky.

In the times _ before _, which he thought of only infrequently, the times before Alpha Trion, when Megatron had been only a glowing seed in the Well of All Sparks, Optimus remembered concealing himself between the strange and wild structures that still pocked Cybertron’s surface. An act of necessity, to shield himself from the acid rain, driven by instinct that remembers a time when the self was primitive and scrabbling and vulnerable.

He had no notion of what the weather on this planet might bring. Certainly the water had not melted him, but the anxious driving feeling that it was better to have shelter and not need it, refused to abate.

He lifted the wing of the creature, felt along the underside. Followed the lines of the skeleton back towards the bulk of the body. Felt the articulations which allowed movement and flight.

He dug his fingers into the great joint of the shoulder, questing until he could feel the tendonous fibers holding it together.

He began to cut.

* * *

The endless cycle of _ now _, the dilation of time as Megatron struck out across the open water, seemed a splinter in his mind, driving him mad. His chronometer, unused to the organic progression of night and day, of sun and darkness, could not adjust. The locked, torpedo shape of his new frame meant he could not look up, not seek the stars with any degree of accuracy.

An unknown number of light cycles out, he encountered another creature.

It appeared passing similar to himself, but the probing of his scanners revealed the similarities to be barely cosmetic in nature. It was large, with bright silver skin, marked with yellow and blue. Massive slabs of organic musculature drove it through the water at speeds, Megatron realized at its approach, that he himself could not hope to match.

He considered scanning it, shedding this torpedo shaped body for something sleeker and speedier, but hesitated as he took in the specifics of its frame. There was less in the way of bulk around its jaws, and it lacked both the savagely pointed dental plates and the monstrously wide gape of the form he occupied currently. Nevertheless, he drew alongside it, watching.

The primitive optic pointed in his direction rolled, twitching, taking him in. While he knew nothing of this creature’s frame-language, the deep parts of his own cerebral module, honed from ages in the pits, sensed the implications like the scent of energon, rising from the first blooding of a match.

The creature feared him.

He coursed it, following just distant enough to keep it from bolting. The novel programming in his cranial module was drawn to its movement, the beat of the fuel pump he could hear within it as it strove onwards. Yet he could tell already it was too bulky to fit into the space between his jaws.

But that didn’t mean he couldn’t still take a piece.

He lunged.

The creature shied, but too slowly. His jaws extended, opening, engulfing, and sank into flesh that tasted of salt and iron. Instinct seized his cranial module, sudden and all encompassing as an electric shock, and his body spun itself in a tight arc, the motion reminiscent of the torque of a drill bit. Tissue tore and blood gushed.

It tasted nothing like energon, too solid, too strange, the texture soft and revolting in his mouth. He tried to spit it out, but the howling maelstrom of novel programming roared up from the back of his throat. He gulped, swallowed, forcing the material into him. Disgust and triumph warred within as he watched the creature go into a death convulsion, fins flailing, sending dissipating curtains of blood into the sunlit waters around them. It shuddered, twitched, and went rigid, unmoving.

He stared at it.

For all the brutality of his existence, Megatron had never sought a living creature for nourishment. Oh he had crushed crystalline shards into powder and suspended them in oil or solvent to consume them, but he had never drained a glitchmouse or turbofox, as he had heard was the custom in distant ages past. It seemed, up until this moment, beneath him. 

Another memory materialized, bright and strange and colored the same tones as the medium in which he floated. Orion again, materials spread across the desk in one of the private viewing rooms in the Hall. Not a datapad, a beaten sheet of metal, deliberately etched with acid and the jagged outlines illuminated with chemicals that rendered them black and stark.

_“Onyx Prime,”_ _Orion had said, tracing the lines of the creature’s fangs. “Ancestor to the Predacons, the primal beings that roamed the wilds of Cybertron.” He tapped the spot between the blank, staring optics. “The rest of the Thirteen sought to build, to forge, to conquer, but Onyx decried all that. He recharged in the crags of the mountains and the deep places of the world. He needed nothing more than his claws and fangs.”_

_ “Soon to be blunted, no doubt,” Megatronus had said. “If they were being used to excavate energon.” _

_ Orion had smiled. “Ah, but he didn’t, you see. Onyx was a hunter, wily and quick to catch his prey. He lived off only what the land was willing to give him.” Orion’s expression had grown a bit nostalgic. “Sometimes I don’t wonder if he was the wisest of the Thirteen.” _

_ Megatronus had snorted aloud. “Oh, truly the wisest. To scrabble in the dirt catching glitchmice for your daily rations?” _

_ Orion had covered his mouth to stifle a small laugh. “Well,” he’d said, optics twinkling in a way that made Megatronus’s spark do uncomfortable things in his chassis. “Perhaps it is a bit unglamorous, but they don’t taste all that terrible.” _

_ Megatronus had gaped at him and Orion had been unable to hold back his laughter. The sound was sudden and shocking in the enclosed space of the room. Orion’s whole face had changed, the quiet reserve melting away and leaving him bright and breathless. Megatronus’s ventilations had stalled out briefly, his processor pleasantly numb as he stared. Orion had finally mastered himself and smiled warmly at Megatronus. _

_ “Why so surprised?” he had said. “Our systems can take in a wide variety of materials and convert them into energon in a pinch. It may not be the easiest or most pleasant of experiences, but neither is it the worst of them.” _

_ “Surely you jest,” Megatronus had said, rather than consider the reasoning behind why he’d been so fixated upon Orion’s face and form. _

_ “Not at all,” Orion had said, solemnly. “You think I was protoformed directly into this hall? I wandered the wilds unhomed and unkempt for quite a time until Alpha Trion found me and trained me up properly to take my place in society.” His expression had dimmed slightly. “Though I admit the adjustment to such caging has been...work.” _

_ Megatronus’s fuel pump had beat strangely then at the bleak look in Orion’s optics. “Caging?” _

_ Orion smiled at him, the barest edge of bitterness on it. “We are all in our private traps.” _

Megatron floated in the sunlit waters and looked at the ragged corpse. There was a shredded, circular hole carved in it, from which dark blood still oozed sluggishly, borne along by the salt water, perfuming the water with iron.

He allowed the novel instincts which now infected his cranial module to take him, and tore into the flesh. Bit and swallowed, bit and swallowed, mindless consumption, stuffing his fuel tank. His frame, metal and organic alike, came alive with the influx of nourishment.

When he looked up, the corpse was in pieces and he was not alone. Numerous smaller creatures of various shapes and sizes had materialized out of the gloom, watching and waiting with dumb, hungry looks which both metal and flesh recognized.

Megatron bared his fangs, and charged them.

* * *

The sun was plunging into the ocean, lighting up the water with internal flames of red and orange, by the time Optimus finished construction of his crude shelter. He had folded the wings of the great monster up and inward, overlapping them to form a somewhat cone-shaped windbreak. The strange, slick-soft pinions which covered them knit tightly enough that he was confident that they might shed the rain. He was covered with sand and the remnants of salt drying on his superstructure, a constant itch at his new programming, which told him that safety and comfort lay beneath, in the water, and in the dark.

At last he gave into his instincts and waded out into the water of the flat, walking deeper until it rose around his arms and chassis. Calcified structures scraped against him, leaving marks in his paint, crunching against his armor. He resisted the urge to transform, but stood silent, letting the tide tug at his frame and the wind brush across his antennae. He ached with faint hunger and knew he would soon have to return, to replace the energy which he had expended with organic tissues that left his mouth tasting of copper. He remembered Megatron, back when their names had both been other than what they were, expressing strangely fastidious affront at the idea of consumption of organic life. So strange, Optimus had thought at the time, that one so physical, so willing to engage in brutality, would balk at the thought of eating the dead.

He’d avoided mentioning to Megatron that it hadn’t only been the Predacons which fed on the bodies of others. Of how there had been another version of the legend of Solus Prime, in which the rest of the Thirteen—no, no it had only been Eleven then—had dismembered her frame and cannibalized her corpse, that they might carry the memory of her with them always.

Did they carry the taste with them ever after, he wondered?

Optimus shivered slightly, and wondered at the thought of Megatron. Had he found his own shelter against the dark? Taken up a frame which could cope with this watery world? Or had he sunk beneath the waves to walk the seafloor in endless blackness, a vast and futile journey across the abyssal plain?

Or was he dead?

A disturbing thought. Megatron had been so long a fixture, just out of sight, waiting and watching and hunting, that the notion he was now nothing more than shipwrecked metal rusting on the bottom of the sea was surprisingly painful. Optimus wondered if he would mourn.

He wondered if anyone else in the galaxy would.

The sun sank out of sight, extinguishing the light. He remained, unmoving, allowing his optics to adjust.

There was a moon above him, small and tinged with blue. The water was so clear he could see straight to the bottom, the pillars of his own legs dark against white sand. He passed his hands through it, felt the tug of fluid resistance, and his ventilations stalled briefly.

There, trailing off the edges of his moving limb, phosphorescent trails of faint blue, like the light from his own optics. He moved his hand again, watched streamers of cold fire ignite in its wake.

The water was alive, he realized, with a tinge of shock. Alive with creatures, a soup of organic life pulsing around him, setting off their tiny flares as he disturbed their equilibrium, a repeated call into the nighttime, _ I am here, I am here _.

He watched until the water settled, then eased back to the shore. He sat beneath his pinion shelter and ate cold flesh that tasted of salt and copper, and thought of glitchmice in his mouth, and of Megatron.

He did not remember falling into recharge, but when he onlined, the sun was high above him. The sand was white as old bones and the water turquoise as far as the optic could see in any direction. He knew, logically, that there must be more where there was one, but it seemed in some fanciful part of his imagination that this was the only hard ground. A single, lonely dot, from which he could hear and see, but never touch.

From where we begin, we always return.

A new place, in which to grow half-sick of shadows, until...what? He dissolved into madness? Collapsed beneath the burning sun and salt to rust into nothingness in a distant corner of the galaxy.

Would it even be so terrible?

He emerged into the sunlight and began to walk the perimeter of his new abode. He’d had to pick up the military patterns of behavior, not had them programmed into him like Ultra Magnus or Arcee, but they still brought some strange comfort. The comfort of repetition, the comfort of ritual.

The comfort of not needing to think.

Sometimes it felt like all he did was think.

For want of something to do, he stood on the beach, with the small waves lapping at his legs, and cast out his scanners again. In the peace and quiet he could now see detect that the ionosphere was quite thick and of unusual composition, sending his questing pings scattering off in all directions.

Which meant by extension that any ship scanning for his signature from orbit would be stymied. They would have to perform a visual scan, criss crossing the planet in search of his image.

He wondered how far he had drifted from the place he had splashed down.

Small buzzing creatures had begun to collect in clouds around the shelter he had built, clustering on the clots and stains of green organic blood upon the pinions. They zipped close and veered away from him, scouting.

Driven from him by the heat he realized. He could feel it rising from the plates of his superstructure, the excess being shunted into his energon collectors, small and ancient as they were.

The dryness and excessive warmth itched at the back of his mind, in conflict with his newly embedded instincts. While part of him thought it might be best to stay put, and hope that his forces could detect him from orbit—presuming they had managed to escape Thundertron and still had a ship of course—it sat ill with him to do nothing.

At last he caved and waded out into the water.

It was more comforting than he wanted to admit to slip into the strange shape, with its many coiling appendages that allowed him to explore the water around him. The light still left him on edge, but the sudden buoyancy was a deep relief. He forced water through the siphonous, hydraulic system which powered his locomotion and circled the sand heap, touching the strange, calcified structures which sprouted like a bizarre famicile of the great crystal gardens in Iacon, which he had visited only once, but which had left an indelible impression.

_ Walking at Alpha Trion’s heels was a strange experience. The old mechanism seemed so much a fixture of the Hall of Records that it was uncountably bizarre to watch him traverse the streets, mingling amongst the crowd, as if he had no greater cares than to visit the market. Orion wished he had Alpha Trion’s talent for appearing unbothered by the great excesses of noise and bustle produced by such crowds, the way that other energy fields would bump and buffet even if one was possessed of the grace and dexterity to avoid direct collision with others. _

_ “There,” Trion had said, gesturing up ahead of them. A pair of arched gates loomed, metal bent and wrought in strange patterns, which as they approached resolved themselves into shapes that Orion recognized, to his bewilderment, as reminiscent of the graven images of the Thirteen. Of the strange and wild creatures which had roamed Cybertron in the days before the cities rose. The ones which haunted the vague memories which preceded the time at which Trion had brought him under his protection. _

_ “Why are we here?” Orion had said. “It can’t be to drop off or pick up anything, they could have transmitted it.” _

_ “To be here is reason enough,” said Trion, never slacking his forward pace. “Sometimes one must get out of one’s space to get out of one’s helm.” He glanced behind him at Orion. “Besides, you’ve never seen the place, and there’s no reason not to.” _

_ Orion rather wanted to question whether they’d be censured for neglecting their duties for frivolity, but Alpha Trion had always seemed to make his own rules. Indeed, sometimes it seemed that the rules and society bent ever so slightly around him, adjusting themselves in minute ways to his will. _

_ Orion had never seen the old mechanism’s records, and thus he could not gauge his age or origin. But something unscientific in the core of him defined them both as “very old” and “unknowable” respectively. _

_ They swept through the gates and into the gardens. The paths were scarcely populated this late into offcycle, only a handful of mechanisms wandering the knotting road that forked and folded back upon itself. The jutting, crystalline growths spiraled towards the sky in delicate spires which caught the lights of the city and cast them into multicolored patterns. Patterns which moved and danced over the their plating. Orion had struggled not to forget himself and trip over his own feet. _

_ Trion had slowed to a crawl near a series of elaborate topiary structures in a riot of blues and whites. Here and there Orion could see a sculpture, wrought in shiny metal, peeking from between the spikes and shards, creatures the like of which he had never seen. Writhing extended tendrils and divided necks branching into innumerable heads, or heads which didn’t look like heads, alien bodies woven in wire thread. _

_ “What are these?” Orion had said. “I’ve never seen the like.” _

_ “You wouldn’t,” Trion had said. “They rusted away long before Iacon was more than a heap of metal struts on the continent. Back when the Sea of Rust ran blue with coolant and they swam and fed from the body of Primus.” _

_ Orion had stared. “They’re Predacons then?” _

_ “Of a sort,” Trion had said. “Though those that called themselves Predacons survived far longer.” _

_ Orion paused to examine a creature that seemed only a mass of writhing tentacles around a huge, central mouth like an interlocking series of rotating saws, tiny, winking optics sprinkled around the rings of teeth. _

_ “They were sapient then?” he had said, hesitantly. _

_ “Of course they were sapient.” Alpha Trion’s voice had snapped out, whip-sharp. “Do not be fooled, Orion. Just because someone does not resemble you does not mean they are an animal.” _

_ Chastised, Orion had returned to studying the statue. Strange to look into a face which was not a face, and to realize that it was worn by a creature with as much cognitive ability as himself. _

_ “I will keep that in mind.” _

Optimus pushed water through his siphon in a gesture that felt very much to him like a sigh. He had even—though it had all come to nothing—thought of inviting Megatronus to join him for a visit to the gardens. For while Megatronus had frequently derided such places as decadence, Orion had not missed the way he would pause now and again to gaze at an advertisement for a museum or event.

Despite what Megatron might say, Optimus had no desire to return to “the way things were.” He well knew the rotted core which rode under the glittering facade of decadence in cities like Iacon. But neither was he naive enough—a naïveté which Megatron frequently presented personally as pragmatism—to imagine that the war to free the population from their shackles of oppression had not claimed as many lives as it had saved.

Optimus slid near to the rim of the reef, probing out with seeking tentacles, feeling his way over the edge. He anchored himself on the fragile wall, and peered over into the darkening water beyond.

He looked into the dark, and thought of Rewind.

In his position in the Hall of Records, Orion had only rarely interacted with the mechanisms tasked with data storage. His own function had been to categorize data, no more, listening and blindly sorting packets as they came to him. It required immense processing power, but far less in the way of recall storage.

That function lay elsewhere, tasked to mechanisms built for that job and that job alone. Robust in memory core, but frail everywhere else, they were considered little more than walking data sticks. In fact, it had not been uncommon for them to fall ill or spontaneously deactivate, only for their cores to be necropsied out of them, for transplant into a new mechanism or cold storage. 

In short, they were the precise sort of mechanisms that Megatron had claimed to target with his revolution.

Optimus had met Rewind after the fall of Cybertron, during a deep space journey through a nebula near Alpha Centauri. He’d immediately recognized the sigil etched on Rewind’s forearm guard, the harsh rectangle with the stylized Quill inside it, the glyph for “record” trailing from the tip.

_ “Where were you stationed?” Optimus had asked, without thinking, and kicked himself for asking. _

_ Rewind had looked up at him in faint surprise. “Iacon,” he’d said, with a touch of wariness. He looked Optimus over in confusion. “Did...you have an intelligence inquiry?” _

_ “No, no nothing like that.” Optimus had shifted, uncomfortable, unable to keep from glancing around. “I used to work in the Hall of Records in Iacon. Archival division. That is all.” _

_ Rewind’s gaze had slid very slowly up and down Optimus’s frame. “You...did?” _

_ “Yes,” Optimus had said, hoping to avoid the direction in which this conversation was heading. “I was simply surprised to see a mechanism from there. I feared everyone had been killed during the fall of Iacon.” _

_ Rewind had looked away. “My partner is an intelligence officer,” he had said hesitantly. “He got wind of things turning south and came and got me out.” _

_ “That was well done,” Optimus had said gently. “I am glad he was able to do so.” _

_ “We both knew it would be no good for me to be there when the Decepticons started looting the place,” Rewind had said, though the tone of his voice had been more weary than angry. _

_ Optimus had nodded. “Could I...perhaps ask a personal question? You need not answer if you wish, and if not we need speak no more of it.” _

_ “I will do my best?” _

_ “Was there a specific reason you chose not to go with the Decepticons?” _

_ Silence. Optimus studied a fascinating section of wall. _

_ “Can you...maybe explain what you mean a little more clearly?” _

_ “If I may speak frankly…” Optimus had said. “Your life in Iacon was likely not a very good one. I saw the way the repository mechanisms were treated. The Decepticon uprising surely must have seemed an opportunity.” _

_ “I don’t have the taste for treason.” _

_ “You misunderstand,” Optimus had said. “Treason is to a government and the government had already failed you. Condemned you as disposable and irrelevant. Why not join a group which promised you a path to freedom and revenge?” _

_ Rewind had sighed. “With all due respect, Prime, have you ever spent any time around a Decepticon squadron?” _

_ “...rather more frequently than most think.” _

_ “Then you have seen what those who resented their own helplessness do when in positions of power and control.” _

_ “You feared you would be hurt?” _

_ “Hurt, violated, subjugated.” Rewind had spread his hands wide. “Whatever you wish to call it. You wish the truth, Prime? While I agree that the old world was rotten, I also knew what atrocities Megatron would allow. I knew he would turn a blind optic to the monstrous acts which would occur under his command, for the sake of strengthening his troops. I see well what lurks under the shelter of the Decepticon cause. It cannot afford mercy, or fragility, and that is a death sentence to one like me.” _

_ “...that is a fair answer.” _

_ Rewind had shrugged. “And yet the world is not. And we find ourselves in a foreign land, shedding blood with our brothers.” _

_ “Indeed.” _

_ “I have to admit,” Rewind had said, once they’d stood some moments in awkward silence. “You aren’t quite what I expected.” _

_ Optimus had tried for a wry smile. “I am rarely what even I expect, from moment to moment.” _

_ And Rewind had laughed, and they’d gone and broken their fast together. _

Optimus tipped himself over the reef rim as if diving. Below him he could see the great swell of the island hidden below the surface, the swirling, frozen waves of volcanic rock. In and out of the pattern of great holes left by the passage of noxious gases, colorful creatures darted, the sight of which made his beak click and clamp.

He let the hunger take him, and plunged into the abyss.

* * *

When Megatron had stuffed himself to bursting, a heavy, unusual feeling that felt like rocks in his tank, he found himself taking peculiar notice of a current of warm water, coursing along close to the sunlit surface. His frame seemed queerly preoccupied with its presence and he swam towards it, scenting along the halocline highway.

It stretched out before him, traveling in a direction his frame knew without knowing was _ south _ , away from the poles of the planet. It tasted, if he could describe it, like _ safety _ and _ quiet _ and some bygone den instinct which he could not name.

He lingered on the curbside, considering the potential merits of entering. He swept by it, allowing one of the long, trailing finials which served as stabilizing actuators to touch it. It was unusually sweet, a significant deficit of salt which did not rasp so harshly against his sensors.

Megatron hated it.

Megatron’s rejection of his determined programming had grown from a method of survival to a point of something approximating pride. An act of supreme nonconformity in which he’d engaged in changes of body and behavior for the end purpose of transformation of the self. From grounder to flier. From digger to killer. From blue to red.

And yet he’d failed. His secret shame; his inability to excise those final weaknesses from his spark and frame. The need for security, to surround himself with the caverns of his birth and find within them the solace of sleep.

_ The shelter at the base of the gladiatorial arena stands was small and dark and stank of spilled energon. Megatronus’s fuel pump felt as loud as the thunder of a drill engine. His frame hummed with remnant battle rage. _

_ He had twitched at the sound of footsteps and turned to see Orion slide around a corner, his optics dim with worry. _

_ For several long moments, they stared at each other. _

_ “Are you alright?” said Orion at last. “I saw that Grinder got in a shot near the end, but I was too distant to tell if you were injured.” _

_ Megatronus had realized then that his cannon had come up, raised and still faintly glowing with the heat of fusion released. It was a new addition to his frame, the welds still tender where it had been affixed to him, the neural fibers pinging in incessant discomfort as they routed themselves into a new part of him. _

_ Orion’s optics had dropped to the cannon, scrutinizing it. Neither of them moved. _

_ “It’s throwing off your balance still, isn’t it?” Orion said quietly. “Not very noticeably, but I saw you stagger when Grinder came in on your left.” _

_ Megatronus had stared at him. _

_ Why, he’d found himself wondering. Why are you not afraid? Why do you look upon something remade in rage and energon and ask me if I am alright? Do you not see the shrapnel peeling off of me? Do you not realize how you will be cut on splinters of metal and crystal. Run, run little robot, back to the warmth and the light of your archives. _

_ “It is,” he had said at last. The words hurt, spiked and splintering. _

_ Orion had reached up, rested his hand on the warm barrel, and guided it down to face the floor. Had stepped within the circle of Megatronus’s arms and pressed a palm against a patch of plating slick with energon. He had probed, palpating gently and Megatronus stood numb and buzzing. _

_ “Nothing,” Orion had said at last, letting out a sigh. “Your armor must have deflected it.” _

_ “Yes.” The sight of energon on Orion’s fingers, delicate digits made for manipulation of consoles and grasping delicate leaves of metal, arrested him. The knowledge that it was the energon of others, his own, the mixing, the inherent wrongness of it all. _

_ “Shall we go elsewhere?” Orion had said. “I am sure you would like to clean up and rest.” _

_ Megatronus had never wanted anything more in his existence. The thought of sluicing away the filth and energon of the fight pits was compelling, the idea of doing so in Orion’s company—whatever that might mean—even more so. And yet he was frozen. Cleaning up and resting meant bringing Orion back to the warm, dark cocoon in which Megatronus would secret himself during the interminable offcycles, the only place sufficiently enclosed that he could at last quiet the nagging of his programming and truly recharge. _

_ The thought of Orion inside such a private and intimate space paralyzed him. Shame and longing and sublimated fear warred for supremacy. _

_ “Shall...I go with you?” Orion had said, and Megatronus had realized he had been silent for too long, had stretched the moment into something uneasy and twisted. _

_ “No,” he had said, and thought he might choke on his despair. _

_ Orion’s optics had held no judgement, only quiet acceptance. “Alright. Do you want something to drink before you go?” _

_ He had nodded dumbly, took the energon that Orion offered. He had drunk it and tasted the gore of the arena. Orion had bid him farewell and left the arena, for the long drive to Iacon. _

_ He had waited in the dark until the remnants of viscera on his armor began to dry, and returned to his quarters. He had crawled into the coffin space, so similar to the tombs which he’d inhabited until very recently. The tombs into which the dim light of their nearest star did never reached. _

_ He had laid in the darkness, carving nonsense shapes into the walls with his claws until next oncycle, and cursed himself for a coward. _

The watery highway led him southward, through a labyrinthine path of jutting rocky outcroppings which strained for the surface as if reaching for the sky. Each one was its own city, a unique pattern of streets marked in coral and trafficked by the strange finned organisms, like the creature he had scanned in miniature. Many were far more colorful than himself, reflecting wavelengths of light which he had seen only rarely.

He had lost track of the number by the time he passed under the broad umbrella of one of the structures and felt a twinge along his lateral lines, the strange, electrified tracks which carved their way down his flanks. He circled the structure several times, spiraling towards the surface.

He breached, the light sudden and blinding, and found that this structure was very different. It rose out of the water, a shallow rise floating in a wide reef flat, topped by tufts of organic life that Megatron recognized vaguely as some type of vegetation.

He transformed, and locked his claws into the rim of the reef, gouging out great tracks in the crust of coral. He hauled himself up and over, heard the calcified structures crack and crunch at his passage.

The water on the other side was shallow, rising only to his thighs. The water was light and clear, the faintest blue, a strange garden of corals and rocks. Small swimming creatures, the same grey as his own hide, fled at his approach.

He squinted up at the blazing sun, which he could already feel crystallizing salt on his superstructure, and began to wade for shore.

It was nearly dizzying to tread on solid—or at least semisolid, the strange white substrate slid beneath his feet like oil sludge—land after such a long swim. He staggered, wondering if he had cracked a gyro. There was no way to open up his own chassis and have a look at his aching components.

He trudged up the slope of the beach, trailing water as it drained from between cracks in his armor. The vegetation formed a woody tangle, much like the morphobots Shockwave had once showed him in one of his field guide holos, accompanied with a bright, flashing note indicating “Do Not Touch”. Then as now, Megatron aimed his fusion cannon at the knotted mass, and fired.

Or rather, he meant to. His cannon cycled to life, energy surging with a whine of building heat. Yet at the last moment, he heard an undoubtedly ill-fated click, and the mechanism died. The spinning reactor ground to a halt, the light died.

Megatron stared at his cannon. Emotions he didn’t want to name as shock and affront were building in his chassis. He probed at the connections between his forearm guard and the shell of the cannon, touched charred wires and flash-melted welds.

His mouth tightened, and his fist curled.

He deployed his blade, and brought it down in a sharp, decisive motion.

A chunk of vegetation toppled, crashing down in a cloud of sand. Small dark creatures burst from the branches, screeching as they flung themselves into a maelstrom of flight. He drew in a sharp breath and withdrew the blade. Turned and stalked across the open beach.

He found quickly that it took very little time at all to make a full circuit of the island, though the treacherous substrate slowed his progress significantly and forced his already aching actuators to work even harder. He made his loop, paused intermittently to scan the horizon.

That such pauses provided moments of rest, he most assuredly did not consider.

He rounded the northernmost edge of the island, only to be presented with a most peculiar sight.

A pile of organic tissue that in life must have been taller than himself spread along the beach. It was coated in long structures, blackly iridescent in color, made of what seemed to be modified tissue, great pinions askew. The corpse was swarmed by clouds of small, flying creatures, buzzing about it and crawling on the body, clustering on where it had been cut. No, not cut. It had been gutted, limbs removed. Great, round bloody holes, gaping pits of bright green, were visible in what must have been the sockets of its wings. Scraps of drying flesh littered the sand nearby, shredded in a peculiar manner that hinted that they might have been consumed. Its secondary limbs lay twisted beneath it, but Megatron could see part of one poking from beneath the creature’s bulk, great curved claws that must have been the length of his sword if they could have been fully extended. The tips were stained with something, hidden under a layer of sand.

Whatever had brought down the creature, it must have been strong.

Megatron’s gaze tracked beyond the carcass. A strange structure sprouted from the sand. A peaked shape, covered with the same slick shiny pinions, wound together and folded to form a low shelter, and choked with flies. He circled it with care, listening for the slightest indication of occupation, but heard only the buzzing drone of thousands of tiny wings. At the front of the structure, a small, dark entrance gaped.

He deployed his sword, and knelt before it.

His optics needed almost no time to adjust to the stuffy darkness. He pressed his claws to the sandy substrate and traced light furrows in the impression of another body.

Someone else was here. Someone who had built this structure. Someone who had struck down the winged monster on the beach.

Someone who was, presumably, still nearby.

Nevertheless, he entered. Shuffled forward on his knees and remembered crawling through the long dark of the mines. The blackness and strange heat, the suffocating and stabilizing weight of thousands of tons of metal.

If you crawled far enough, some had whispered, at night while the overseers recharged and there was nothing to do but wait for the turn of cycle they never saw, you might find your way down to the Core. The primal wellspring of creation, the gaping morass of eternity, never meant to be trod in reverse. The birthplace of all life, sacred and monstrous.

The Well of All Sparks.

Megatron himself had little memory of his journey through that unholy birth canal, little more than clawing his way away from the light, towards the infinite black chasm which yawned above him. And then there had been only confusion.

Confusion, and pain, and anger.

He turned himself around within the space and considered it. It was perhaps half again as large as himself, rather more roomy than—as much as he hated to admit it—he preferred, but not so much larger as to indicate the presence of something bigger than he. Certainly not on the order of the monster which had been butchered to create it.

Interesting.

So the builder was smaller, but clearly sentient. Clever enough to bring down larger prey. He pictured the bloody sockets on the carcass, the clean way the internal strut had been sheared off at the joint of the shoulder. The sharp angle of it, the flat surface. The way the injury had been seared instantly, sealing off the flow of green organic fluid, the smell of burnt copper.

A bladed cut, by something sharp and hot. Something like an energon blade.

His fuel pump quickened.

He swallowed back the urge to tear apart the structure, to howl his challenge at the infinite blue sky and bellow for Optimus, for it must be he. A profound sense of something which he didn’t want to call relief washed over him. For if he was to be banished to this purgatory, to the place where time and tide rolled in infinite, recursive progression, grinding up the upwelling substrate into a billion grains of sand, then far better for him to fall here with his opposite. That they might fight forever like the Primes of old, might bloody the sands with their energon and fall at last in meteoric glory to rust into nothingness on the shores of an alien sea.

He pressed his palms to the sand and felt a great weight slide from him. He was not to drift unmoored and forgotten; he had aligned himself with a magnetic pole.

He had found true north.

He waited, until the sun plunged into the ocean and the stars blazed up above him. As it set, a chorus rose from the sparse woods behind him, an overlapping swell of crying voices, deep and breathy, like the wailing of professional mourners wandering through the dark. He cocooned himself in the feathered bower like a lindworm within a marriage bed, listening to the scrape of blade on armor as he engaged and disengaged his weapon in endless, restless repetition. He listened to the rush of the tide. He listened for the dark, drowning deep of night.

And finally, though he did not intend it, he slipped away, lulled by the lap of the waves and the wails of the lost souls, his processor dropping into recharge, and he slept.

* * *

  


Optimus did not know what he had expected of the ocean at night, but it was similar and yet nothing at all like his sojourn into the abyss. It seethed with life, glowing life, hunting life, hungry life. A gelatinous creature, its edges marked in glowing ripples, rose up from below him, drifting in the snowy current. His own biolights lit his way like lanterns through the gloom, much as they had on the strange and terrible journey he had made so long ago. A journey of being and becoming, of walking a path wrought by sorrow and pain.

A journey to the Core.

Optimus did not consider himself especially religious. He had never practiced with the cults in the days before Iacon rose, and when all but the most secular of celebrations—really dilutions of observances of the high holy days—had been quietly suppressed, he had not joined with the sects who rose in protest. Even coming face to face with what many species might consider a literal manifestation of a deity had not changed him in ways that he considered to be that profound.

Well, had not changed him mentally or spiritually that is.

For Optimus had looked into the pulsing star seed Core which represented his planet and his god, and seen himself.

Not himself in the sense of his reflection, but a being very much like himself. An overpowering awareness yes, but overpowering only because of the scale of it. Time, the vastness of space, the infinite variety of life, these things meant something quite different to a creature which measured time in star deaths and sparkpulses in eons.

And even looking into the face of god didn’t mean you didn’t still need to drink your energon and take out the refuse the next cycle. Not even looking into the face of god could stop the inevitable collapse of all he had ever loved.

He allowed himself to rise to the surface and breached, turning to allow the great, gelatinous eye on the side of his sublimated helm to turn towards the sky. He focused his optics, scanning the star sprinkled night for a sign of life.

Silence, no hint of the screaming noise of a hundred stars captured and smothered in the black vacuum of space. This far from the island, there seemed no difference between the black ocean upon which he floated, and the bowl of stars above him. The patterns of the stars were unknown to him, no puzzle piece which he could fit among the thousands of star charts which he had viewed during his long stint of curation which Alpha Trion had assigned him when he saw the small archivist flagging and sinking into a deep depression.

_ “To give you something else to do,” Alpha Trion had said. “As complex a processor as you have, it’s not well for it to be too idle.” _

_ “None of the other archivists seem to have as much trouble,” Orion had grumbled. _

_ “Merely better at hiding it than you,” Alpha Trion had said. “I assure you, they chafe, in their own ways. But they don’t have your burden to bear.” _

_ “Burden?” _

_ Then Alpha Trion had done something which he had never before done. He had reached out and pressed a long, clawed digit to the side of Orion’s chassis, tracing the seam of a small and hidden hatch. One of six, mirrored on each side of his chestplate. _

_ Orion had flinched despite the gentle touch. “What are you doing?” _

_ “You have never wondered why you have so many of these? Why so much redundancy built into your data cables?” _

_ Orion had looked away. “Jazz...Jazz says something there are glitches. In the building process. You found me on the outskirts of the city. I cannot remember...I assumed I was a throwaway.” _

_ Alpha Trion had snorted. “Nothing so.” He had sighed deeply, as if contemplating something which saddened him greatly. “Suffice to say that the frame, the processor, and the spark, are all intertwined. We tend to think of the processor as existing up here.” Then he’d reached out and tapped Orion’s helm, right above his optics. “But for machinery as delicate and complex as these, more processing power is required. Thus there are extensions, extrusions of your neural circuitry which stretch out into your cabling and allow you to operate them, in a sense, think with them.” _

_ Orion had stared at him, his brow ridges furrowed. “You mean...you mean, I really do have my brain module in my chassis?” _

_ Alpha Trion had thrown his helm back and laughed. “Cheek! More complex than that obviously. Perhaps you could stand to use those extra brain modules a bit more, hm?” _

_ Orion had ducked his helm in embarrassment. “I cannot say that I see what you are getting at. Surely I would have noticed if I had extra brain modules stashed away in my data cables.” _

_ “ _ ** _Sensory_ ** _ modules, young cheeky archivist,” Alpha Trion had said. “You have never noticed they act as an expansion of your sensor net?” _

_ Orion had opened his mouth to state that no, he never had, and had frozen, arrested by a sudden surge of memory. Of Megatronus, leaning over him at his console, reaching out to lay curious claws on the twin data cables which were all that Orion ever dared to extend when at his work. The consoles weren’t built for more than that anyway, and while most of the other archivists tended to mind their own business and not look into his cubicle—though many of them were unable to help themselves when Megatronus came to visit, the novelty of a handsome gladiator of renown stopping into a facility which most of society considered beneath their interest far too much to resist—he still did not dare to reveal his strange glitch anywhere it could be spotted. _

_ Orion had been distracted, by his work, by the knowledge of prying optics and audio sensors nearby, by Megatronus’s presence, and had not realized, absorbed in his task of transferring data, until Megatronus’s hand had closed around one of his cables. _

_ The sensory input was like a lightning bolt. A searing, acute electric sensation which zipped down the cable directly into his spinal strut, the feedback sending a pulse of current through his spark. Orion had gasped aloud. _

_ Megatronus had frozen, looking rather like a turbofox about to be run down by a vehicle, his glowing optics wide and shocked. He had snatched his hand away. “I did not think—did I hurt you?” _

_ Orion had clutched at the edge of his console, reeling, unable to speak. Then he had looked up at Megatronus and seen the dark clouds roiling in his expression, the conflicted visage of someone who knew only how to respond to fear with anger and was struggling to suppress both. “No,” he had gasped. “No, no, no you did not hurt me. I am alright, it...it was a shock, only.” _

_ Megatronus’s optics had dropped to Orion’s cables, the plugs still fixed in their ports within the console. He had looked doubtful. _

_ “Truly,” Orion had insisted. “I am fine. Here, look.” _

_ And then he had done something that had shocked him to the core. Something which had haunted Optimus through the long dark of space, when he heard the whispers, the speculative looks, the longing tones directed his way, even if none of the sources of such looks or tones ever truly wished for what they implied. _

_ He had taken Megatronus’s hand, and placed it upon his cable once more. Curled his fingers over armored knuckles that dwarfed his hand, pressed them into place around the delicate gathering of neural fibers inside its insulated cover. _

_ Megatronus’s fingers had twitched, clawed thumb tracing the shape of the cable in his palm. Orion had shivered, but held firm. Kept his optics fixed on Megatronus. _

_ He had felt at that moment, as if they teetered upon the precipice of something huge and alien. Something which threatened to rock the foundation of all they were together, and yet seemed as if it would open doors to vast realms of possibility. _

_ And then another archivist in the next cubicle had coughed politely, and they had sprung from each other as if burned. _

Optimus rotated himself in the water, contemplating. He flexed his tentacles as one, felt the same sensation as when he had dared to extrude all of his data cables at once_ — _ late at night in his cell in Iacon, when no one could see _ — _and realized he had been a fool.

In enclosing himself within the shell of a beast for protection, he had in the same moment turned himself inside out. His cables, once secreted away within his chassis where he could hide them, now trailed free, quiescent in the current behind him.

And yet, now it was different. No longer were they so fragile, glowing with the pulse of energon and fiber optics beneath their thin insulation. Now they had their own protection, each of the twelve equipped with rows of vicious hooks and sequences of toothed suckers that lined the ventral surfaces. He reached to touch the edge of a hook with the tip of a tentacle, and marveled at the sharpness.

Extensions of his sensor array, Alpha Trion had said.

Slowly, he inverted himself, turning the sharp beak at the very core of him to face the chill night air. He spread the twelve main tentacles out around him like the spiked crown with which he had once seen one of the gladiators in the arena crowned. He struggled to push down the unease that he always associated being so exposed, to remind himself that there was nothing and no one.

When he finally quieted his mind, he activated his sensor array.

The surge of data was an explosion in his processor. The movement of the current, the brush of the winds, the buzzing of the magnetic poles beneath him, all surged through him, sending crackles of electrical feedback into his core. His scanners unfolded, his range doubled, no tripled, in an instant. He spun in a slow circle, like one of the great radio dishes that pointed into the darkness, for communication in the deepest reaches of space. His awareness leapt free of the planet’s surface, zipping into the ionosphere, skipping lightly along the charged metal particles that encircled the planet, borne on the tidal winds.

He reached, probing, looking for evidence of a ship. Radio chatter, the energy signature of engines large enough to consume him, the wake it might cut in the upper atmosphere.

There, on the edges of his consciousness, a disruption, but a large one. He strained, searching for resolution…

Something sharp jangled against his awareness, disrupting the peace and flow of the scan. He twitched, trying to shake it off, but it was lost. He could feel the expansive sense array into which he had tapped slipping from his reach.

Frustrated, he flipped in the water, bobbing in the space, flexing and curling his tentacles. He struck out bluntly, with his ordinary scanners, trying to sense what had disrupted his attention…

There, towards the southern pole of the planet. The way which he had come.

Back to the island.

A strange sense of foreboding swept over him, and a thread, like a fine bit of wire, seemed to tighten around his spark.

He knew that energy signature.

Megatron.

A mixed swell of emotions, elation blended with apprehension and weariness. Quiet but troubled elation at the thought that Megatron still functioned. Weariness at the prospect of what Megatron’s presence might mean. Weariness at the thought of battle, though it was tinged with a slight sense of satisfaction. That it all might end somehow and that he might be at last allowed to rust in pieces on the shore of an alien sea.

Should he go? Abandon the island and try and recapture that tranquility which might allow him to access that heightened state of sensory awareness? Throw his fortune to the seas and leave Megatron to make his own way? Surely Soundwave would find him eventually.

And yet…

Trying very hard not to consider his actions too closely, Optimus turned southwards.

It seemed to take very little time to return to the island, borne along by the warm currents through the darkened streets of the reefs. The night traffic surged around him, parting the way as he propelled himself forward with siphonous jets.

The tide was low when he finally returned, the reef flat shallow and lit by moonlight. Optimus transformed, both comforted and simultaneously uneasy to realize that he could no longer fully conceal his tentacles. They hung down his dorsal struts like a hooked waterfall, twitching and sending droplets of water dripping onto the sand. The peaked, black structure of the shelter he had built loomed on the beach.

As quietly as he could, he approached.

He knelt before the opening, blades hair trigger, and peered within the darkness.

No response.

And yet, he could _ feel _ Megatron’s presence within the shelter. Could hear the soft rush of his ventilations beneath the lap of the waves, could feel the ripples of his energy signature, rising and dipping in steady rhythm with his sparkpulse.

In recharge.

Dumbfounded, Optimus rocked back on his heels.

Megatron seemed to be in true recharge. Was it a trap? If so, it was a clumsy one.

Then again, Megatron’s cleverness when it came to laying traps was never quite as advanced as he seemed to think it was.

Troubled, Optimus slowly lowered himself to sit on the sand at the mouth of the shelter. As his optics adjusted, he could see the dark mass of Megatron slumbering within. He could have dealt with a Megatron who greeted him with blades and cannon, but this? Besides the fact it seemed highly irregular that Megatron might have chosen to recharge at all, how was Optimus expected to respond to this discovery? To attack Megatron when he was vulnerable in recharge?

Yes, he could almost hear Ratchet say. You _ are _ expected to do this. For the sake of the galaxy. For the sake of every Autobot in existence. For the sake of every Cybertronian in existence.

One life, in exchange for countless others.

Optimus offlined his optics, tipping his helm back to face the stars. How could he explain to Ratchet, to anyone, that the only life he had ever been willing to trade in that manner was his own?

The one life which the universe seemed patently unwilling to take.

Again and again, he had fallen. Stabbed and shot and burnt beyond recognition. Ripped apart by antimatter guns, bisected, limbs removed, set alight as he plunged meteoric into burning atmosphere. And yet still he had struggled back from the brink, spark swelling back to life, awakening again and again in Ratchet’s medbay, to see optics brimming with relief and disappointment mingled.

He onlined his optics and watched Megatron slumber. Listened to the change of the tide and thought of the wheeling blackness above them, their respective forces hiding in the spaces between the stars. The galaxy holding its breath as a titanic struggle paused for just a sparkpulse of time.

What harm would it do to steal a few more moments?

* * *

Morning brought with it the rain.

The sound of rain was something ingrained into the processor of nearly every Cybertronian. A warning signal, wrought deep in the spark and the brain module, stretching back to the sequences spun out from the Well of All Sparks at the dawn of time.

Megatron came awake in an instant. The instinct to flee coiled his limbs beneath him, drove the frantic search of his shelter for the slightest leakage, before his brain module had fully come online.

Nothing, the structure shed the rain, and he could find no dampness on the underside of the fibrous, overlapping leaves. It had been clearly built by someone who knew what they were doing. Someone who had perhaps themselves had to hide from the acid touch of the rain.

He sat back in the divot of sand, and realized that Optimus was sitting outside the mouth of the structure, looking at him.

Optimus’s legs were folded, cross-legged, the skinny, silver joints of his knees awkwardly angled on either side of him. Rain sheeted down his superstructure, running in rivulets down his bright armor, pinging off in fat droplets like bullets. Only there was something strange about his armor, the shifted shapes that signified a new alt mode, an ocular quality of movement which before it had lacked. The red and deep blue of his plates seemed to shift as Megatron stared at them. His bright blue optics stared at Megatron out from beneath the pouring rain.

There was something horrifying about it, beautiful and obscene all at once.

And the sight of it, of Optimus, in that moment, caught in the rain in a way the deepest core of Megatron screamed to be impossible, arrested him. Stayed his hand for a moment, caused him to hesitate, leashed by instinct for a bare instant.

Something of his thoughts must have shown on his face, because Optimus raised an expressive brow ridge, as if to say “aren’t you going to join me?”

“So,” said Megatron, and nearly started at the sound of his own voice. It seemed an age since he had engaged in something so civilized and pedestrian as speech. “The rain here is not capable of melting you into a screaming pile of circuits. A pity.”

Optimus smiled faintly. “You never know, it could be some element of protection conferred by my new alt mode. And perhaps even yours, as it seems you have acquired one. The question is, do you feel like testing it?”  


Megatron scowled. “I could vaporize you from here.”

“So you say,” said Optimus. “And yet you have not.” His gaze flicked towards Megatron’s cannon. “You need repairs.”

“Are you offering?” Megatron jested.

“Not this time,” said Optimus. “Though I should think I have done quite enough of that over the millennia.”

The words cut deep. Megatron bared his fangs, felt plating peel back over rows upon rows of deadly, pointed triangles of metal. “And yet what you have broken does not even begin to balance it out.”

Those brilliant optics shifted in the haze of rain. So blue, those optics, like the ocean around them, and concealing depths just as treacherous.

“Be careful, Megatron,” Optimus said softly. “That sounded almost bitter.”

Rage blazed up in the star seed core of him, exploding outwards. It blasted out of him, surging up past instinctive fear graven in him since before he’d ever tasted the touch of the overseer’s lash.

He exploded out of the shelter, flung himself from the shallow den and out into the tropical rainstorm.

Optimus caught him at the apex of his leap, shifted his mass up and over, flipped Megatron over his helm and sent him careening out into the reef flat. He felt the coral crunch and break beneath him.

Above them, a thunderhead crackled, a magnificent display that put to shame the electrical storms that ravaged the Rust Sea. He rolled in time to see Optimus rise, an array of hooked tendrils coiling behind him, like one of the Predacons of old, an eldritch etching of a forgotten age. Megatron could see quite well now that his plating was alive with the pulse and play of moving patterns. Like an optical illusion that caused the vision to slip and slide on the angles and edges of him.

Megatron laughed, half hysterical.

“Bitter, Optimus?” he said. “Never. For this world, every world, took everything from me, and yet they all saw fit to give me this. That even here, squatting on this backwater, you should be here, reshaped and wrought for battle. That we might fight like gods of old.”

He surged up from the flat, and charged.

Optimus countered him swiftly, rising to meet him like a wave crashing on rock. Again he deflected Megatron’s charge, sent him staggering on the slippery wet sands of the beach.

In that moment, Megatron forgot his sword, his cannon, all the trappings of civilized warfare. He turned on Optimus with a bellow of rage. They fought like beasts, claw on claw and tooth on beak. He ripped at Optimus’s new flesh, felt energon pour from his own under the onslaught. Everything tasted of salt and energon and the electric copper flavor of the storm.

Those strange new appendages lashed around Megatron, anchoring in his plating, mooring him as he barreled into Optimus. They overbalanced and crashed over in a spray of water. The tentacles tightened on him, hooks scraping weals in his plating, wrenching wires.

Megatron hissed and dug in his claws, writhing for freedom, for leverage. Optimus’s fingers were as blunted as ever, but they squeezed down with surprising force. Megatron heard metal creak, felt sensors crush. He thrashed, squirmed, and lay still, his fuel pump a dull roar in his audio sensors, waiting with mutinous rage for the opportunity to escape.

“When I free myself,” he snarled, low enough that his own words sounded half lost in the roar of the surf. “I will tear you limb from limb.”

The strange, hooked appendages hitched tight around him. “You may find rather more difficulty than you once did,” said Optimus, his tone rather dry considering their position. “I do appear to have many more of them now.”

“What happened to your ridiculous and annoying sense of fair play?” snapped Megatron. “Release me at once and let us fight properly.”

“Despite your superficial modifications,” said Optimus, in that way that had always infuriated Megatron. “You do appear to have retained your own ridiculous and annoying habit of demanding I follow your command while simultaneously insulting me and threatening me with deactivation.”

Megatron bit him.

This was no idle gesture. Megatron realized with a surge of battle-joy, that his upgraded dentition now sliced through metal armor with increased ease, shearing off bits and leaving a reflected negative of his teeth on the edge of Optimus’s pauldron. He tasted energon on his tongue and bit harder, not even sure precisely _ what _ he had managed to cram into his mouth, but uncaring if it meant he could cause pain, force Optimus to notice him, to take this battle seriously.

Beside him, Optimus sighed, sounding just the slightest bit annoyed.

“Release me,” Megatron attempted, from around a mouthful of metal and wiring. It came out rather muffled.

“Gladly,” said Optimus, peevishly. “Except my new alt mode is proving as uncooperative as you, and I cannot deal with the both of you at the same moment.”

“What?” Megatron spat out his mouthful and squirmed, felt his bonds cinch down in response. “You utter fool, you’ve managed to lose control of your alt? How did you even achieve that?”

“Not every organism on this planet is as simply constructed as the guise in which you have cloaked yourself,” said Optimus. “There are certain quirks of biology which must be accounted for.”

“‘_ Quirks of biology _’?” said Megatron in disbelief. “You speak as if these…” he found himself strangely unable to refer to them as ‘ridiculous’ when they were so sharp and so close, “appendages are under their own control?”

“For all intents and purposes, they are,” said Optimus, looking rather uncomfortable. “The unique biology of the organism which I scanned merged with some...quirks of my own frame. All of these,” and here the tentacles squeezed lightly, “are operating essentially under secondary processors. I can direct them, obviously, but this close, this pressed by instinct, they appear to be doing more or less what they please.”

“Speak plainly or not at all.”

“And what they please,” said Optimus, sounding just a bit frustrated. “Is to imprison a threat, to keep it immobilized, where it cannot hurt.”

Megatron stared at him, a strange, nearly satisfied sensation curling in the core of him. “This close, to _ me _, you mean.”

Optimus did not answer.

Several moments passed in awkward silence.

“Any insight as to _ how _ we can overcome these ‘secondary processors’?” said Megatron. “Perhaps sometime before we both rust to pieces?”

“I should think that would be patently obvious,” said Optimus.

“How?’

“Reduce the threat.”

Megatron stared at him. “And how precisely, am I supposed to do that? Surrender? Promise to write up a fancy ceasefire contract I have no intention of completing? Suggest that we can all be comrades and sit down and drink energon together and beat our blades into datapads and study war no more?”

“If you remember, we used to do quite a bit of the former,” said Optimus dryly.

“I don’t want to talk about that!” Megatron hissed.

Optimus sighed like he had a helmache. “Then I am certain you will think of some solution,” he said. “As our other option is to lie here until we rust.”

Megatron scowled at him. Reduce the threat; Optimus might as well have asked for the stars in the sky, the request was just as easy and practical. How was he supposed to explain to Optimus’s brainless appendages that he did not present a threat?

From this distance, Optimus’s optics were clear and bright blue, no film of haze from the rain-fog, though fat droplets of water still ran down his faceplates. They were so steady and piercing that Megatron, though he would have never admitted it, could scarcely bear to look into them. He looked past Optimus’s helm and up into the grey fog morning of the tropical storm, wishing he could still see the stars.

Reduce the threat.

Had it always been inevitable? Was it always leading to this? Those moments in the arena, and the archives, those barest instances during which they had brushed past each other, too clumsy, too apprehensive, too late. So well made for each other, and yet so utterly incapable and unsuited. Was this always meant to happen?

Optimus made a quiet and strange noise, but Megatron swallowed the sound. Once, on a broadcast from Nebulos, which he’d witnessed on a jumbo screen while walking the streets of Iacon, he’d watched two organic beings press their faces to each other. Remembered the way they had entwined their many-fingered hands and stroked the ridged and slick bumps of their organic, fleshy helms. It had seemed a strange and pointless ritual, but it was to that ritual which he now turned. It seemed an act far better suited to beings made of softer metal than they, but Megatron persisted, wielded his fanged maw with all the gentleness he could muster.

“What are you doing?” Optimus murmured in a hushed voice, as they parted and came together and parted once more, in tune with the surf on the sand.

“Shut up,” said Megatron, diving in once more. “I saw it in a travel ad for Nebulos one time.”

Optimus made a soft, choked sound and shook against him, tremors which rocked his plating like small tectonic quakes.

It took Megatron several moments to realize he was laughing.

“Stop it,” he said, trying to keep the petulant edge from his tone. “We are not supposed to reduce my supposed threat level through you mocking me.”

“Not mocking,” said Optimus, struggling to suppress the quiet chuckles which continued to bubble out of him. “Never mocking.” He drew in a deep vent of air and seemed to master himself, though his optics still twinkled with amusement. “And I did not say you needed to stop.”

Megatron had never been so quick to rise to a challenge.

Time seemed to stretch and dilate, though Megatron was vaguely aware of the tide swelling around them. It offered a strange sense of buoyancy, allowing them to shift and roll within their woven prison. He licked and bit at Optimus’s mouth with blind purpose, felt charge crackle between the places that they touched. The restless, building excitement made his spark spin with anticipation and unease.

For Megatron, pleasure was one of those strange and slippery sensations which had been made and remade in the mines and the pits. Broken down and reforged in endless succession, until only those who matched a certain manifestation, who exercised their pleasure upon others, rather than with them, were not at risk of utter destruction. If you desired something—or someone—not conquered in pain and blood, or at least the appearance of such, you were at best, sneered at, at worst at risk of catching a blade in the backstruts.

In short, it had been a rather long time since Megatron had attempted any endeavor of this nature.

Around them, Optimus’s queer appendages shifted and roiled, hooks catching and suckers attaching and releasing. The tips probed between slits in Megatron’s armor, testing and provoking little surges of current as sensors were stimulated. Optimus grasped at Megatron’s chassis and they rolled together, sliding further down the beach and onto the watery flat. Coral cracked and broke at their passage and an odd, dorsoventrally flattened creature surged up from beneath the bone white sand and fled.

Megatron ended up beneath, pressed into the sand and half immersed in saltwater. Optimus covered him, limbs akimbo, their faces touching at the interface of sea and sky.

Millennia before, alone in the dark cocoon of his berth, Megatronus had dreamed in idleness of what it might be like to have Orion perched above him, open and joyous, using Megatronus as a tool for his own pleasure, optics alight with happiness.

Now, Megatron drew Optimus below the surface and kissed him awash in water thick with organic salts. Slid his hands beneath the writhing mat of tentacles and hooked his claws into the small of Optimus’s back.

Wound together as they were, Megatron could not easily spread himself. But perhaps it was for the best. That he need not think too closely about the implications of the act itself, that he might sink beneath the shell of instinct and need and demand as he always had. That Optimus focus on him, turn that powerful attention and intelligence upon nothing else in the universe, so that he might know, just for a moment, that he was of primary importance in Optimus’s optics.

And that Megatron might pretend that he was allowed to want this, to take it, to have it, cradle it close to his spark.

Optimus’s tentacles slid against them both, loosening and shifting, but Megatron had no processing power left to spare for thoughts of freedom. He bared himself unthinking and felt all thoughts blown from his processor when Optimus reached to touch.

“Interesting,” murmured Optimus against his mouth, words half lost in the lapping water. “Your alt mode seemed not too dissimilar, but here, here you are different.”

“What?” said Megatron, a bit inelegantly. 

Instead of answering, Optimus carded his fingers through _ something _which made Megatron jerk uncontrollably. The sensory feedback was confused, doubled where before it had been singular.

“How typical,” said Optimus, and Megatron felt the barest flash of annoyance that he sounded so composed. “That even this part of you should appear a blunt instrument, but if one takes the time…” And here he traced a line down the structure which sent Megatron’s helm spinning. “There are hidden complexities within it.”

Bewildered, Megatron struggled to angle himself to see to what Optimus was referring. It was difficult to see much through the tangled thicket of limbs, but he finally got a glimpse of Optimus’s hand, the split structure threaded between his fingers and cradled in his palm. The tips flowered open, a queer umbrella structure like a miniature satellite array, arranged with hooks and tiny spines.

“A pity,” commented Optimus, thumbing the tips and pressing them close as Megatron writhed. “Four millennia and I still do not get to find out how you feel inside me.”

Megatron heard himself make a garbled noise of what might have been outrage. “Coward.”

Optimus smiled, the slightest quirk of the mouth. “Pragmatist.” He pressed his mouth to Megatron’s. “Besides, there are other options.”

Megatron scowled at him. “I know far better than to assume your ‘options’ are any improvement.”

“Are you so certain?” said Optimus, raising a curious orbital ridge. “You have not even seen what it is that I have to offer.”

“Is this a frag or a negotiation?” said Megatron, huffing. “Are you going to bring in your Autobots to hold court while we discuss the niceties of ceasefire length and demilitarized zones?”

“Only if we can frag on the negotiating table while they do so,” said Optimus mildly. “From what I know of him, such minor displays are incapable of distracting Ultra Magnus from his holo presentations and data charts.”

Megatron choked on a slight laugh and Optimus’s optics brightened. As he struggled to master himself, he felt something thick slide up the inside of his leg, coiling into the gaps of flexible mesh at the hip joint, and froze.

“What is that?”

“I believe this is what you might call an initial draft,” said Optimus. The limb coiled higher. “Do you have any edits to propose?”

“If you think I am going to allow you to jam one of those hooked _ things _ where it has no business being jammed—”

Optimus caught his hand, pinned close and near to their bodies and fed it in the narrow, watery gap between them. He cupped his hand around the outside of Megatron’s claws, urging them to curl around the strange, thick structure which twined itself around his wrist with almost curious intent.

Megatron’s felt his optics go wide and Optimus laughed softly. “No need to look like one of those painted dramateurs in the street theater in Iacon. I promise it is not actually as large as you think it is.”

He slid their hands down the length of it as one, until they reached the tip, where it spread slightly, opening up into a soft and nearly spongy platform, covered with little textured pads. Megatron traced the shape of it, feeling the way that Optimus twitched as he explored the ridges and folds. He thought of how they might feel against the soft spaces within he had so frequently feigned ignorance of, and felt his spark give a queer lurch.

“Your thoughts?” said Optimus mildly.

“I would sooner tear my spark out before begging for you inside me,” said Megatron flatly.

“Oh?”

“But that does not mean I will not strenuously encourage the act.”

The act was more easily discussed than accomplished. The trade off which came with enhanced buoyancy was lack of leverage, and they spun slowly like clumsy dancers as Optimus probed between them, bumping repeatedly against the sandy bottom as they did so. At last they became lodged between two large coral outcroppings. Megatron felt the crystalline structures scrape across his superstructure, scratching furrows in metal and hinting that he might be extremely sore later, but he could barely bring himself to care about it. Not with Optimus pressing him down into the crevasse, squirming against him with him avid heat.

Megatron let out a garbled noise as Optimus found the mark, snapping down on whatever he could reach. His mouth ached in truly peculiar fashion, a deep and driven urge to bite, to hold. In the roots of his processor writhed shadows upon and over each other, stiff and clumsy bodies entwining in the pitiless ocean, like a holographic reproduction of a painting he had once glimpsed on Orion’s console, a melange of religious and profane iconography, Drafter’s _ In the Garden of Subterranean Delights. _ Where some artists might have used the images of frolicking turbofoxes as a substitute for more carnal suggestions—a matter of necessity transformed into a style in the times when the more abstract art movements had begun to be viewed with sneering distaste at best and suspicion at worst—Drafter had mined the images of the very earliest Predacons, before the Rust Sea had dried up and become a wasteland. Each figure in the fresco seemed a mass of eyes and tentacles, coiling fins and colorful spines, all coupling in reckless abandon, though in the case of many it was patently unclear just _ what _ they were doing.

_ “I admit,” Megatronus had said. “I would not have pegged this as an object of your interest.” _

_ “What?” Orion had said. “Oh, you mean the painting. I suppose it is a bit peculiar.” _

_ “I thought you would have been more appreciative of a tranquil landscape,” Megatronus had said. “Perhaps a cityscape of Praxus at moonrise, or the Mitteous Plains under a full spread of stars.” _

_ “Landscapes are indeed pleasant,” Orion had agreed. “But there is something to be said for artwork that has such movement and complexity. But that is beside the point. What I appreciate aesthetically and what you do must needs be different, we are different mechanisms of course, but the importance of such things are only that they make you think.” _

_ “Make you think?” Megatronus had said, raising an orbital ridge. He had scrutinized the image again, the strangely organic shapes, the sleek movement of limb on limb. It was difficult to tell in such a reproduction, but it seemed that the artist had utilized a certain kind of pigment that glowed and faded in turn, that parts of the writhing congregation leapt into focus only to fade back into the background over and over, like the movement and play of shadows in clear solvent. _

_ “It may sound odd, I guess,” Orion had said then, his tone full of hesitance. “But I enjoy that peculiar combination of what I am told to perceive as lovely, and that which I am told to perceive as hideous. I enjoy...I suppose it would be beautiful horrors.” _

_ “And am I?” Megatronus had said, strangely wishing to pick at the sense of unease which twinged through him at these words. “A beautiful horror? Your beautiful horror?” _

_ Orion had actually looked a little surprised. “No…” he had said, sounding as if he were turning the thought over in his processor. His mouth had quirked in a very slight manner and his hand had risen, almost absently, to brush across the side of his own chassis. Across the plating which, in certain angles of light, Megatronus could see the inset of six hatches carved deeply into the protoform beneath. Perfect mirrors and matches of the two hatches which Orion would open to manipulate his console. Megatronus had never known anyone with so many, or what would have compelled a mechanism to be expelled from the Well of All Sparks constructed thusly. “If anything, I am yours.” _

As Megatron pulled Optimus, transformed by this brutal planet, into him, kissed him and twined hooked appendages around his body, he thought there might be something to this business of beautiful horrors.

He also thought, as Optimus pressed something inside the tenderest parts of his anatomy that looked like it had never been intended to enter anything, that he might have made the slightest miscalculation. His jaw tightened down, a rictus of shock, and he stared blindly, optics uncomprehending as he was stretched, felt the appendage twist and push into places he broadly suspected that the typical anatomy used to perform this act was _ not _ capable of touching. And yet it felt so strangely elating, to be opened up, to be spread and touched and explored so thoroughly. Optimus pawed at him with enthusiasm, and Megatron hooked his claws and teeth in his plating, and proceeded to encourage him in most brutal fashion.

“I do not wonder if this is madness,” said Optimus.

“This is foreplay,” Megatron, letting up so he could speak again. “If it were madness, I would ask for your spark.”

“Then remind me if we ever fall into madness,” said Optimus. He ground in tight and gasped. “And I shall give it.”

Megatron felt his own spark spasm at this, hiccup in a way that signaled impending overload or deactivation. So close the two were, the coupling and the killing instinct. And yet he felt no fear in Optimus’s field, no hesitation, as they plunged over the underwater cliff together, and into the unknown yet beloved abyss.

* * *

  


They crawled upon the damp sand, side by side, and lay like corpses stretched together beneath a shroud of stars. They did not touch, not directly. Optimus was uncertain they could again equal the depths of touch they had achieved in the moonlit reef flat, but they modulated the harmonics of their energy fields, pushing and pulling gently back and forth in succession, matching each flow to ebb. 

Optimus traced the maps of strange stars, the hazy cloud of a great galactic arm arching above them, and thought of reading star charts together in the cool blue light of the long destroyed archives.

“What comes next?” said Megatron. His voice cracked the darkness, a hairline fracture in the tranquility that enveloped them, sand catching in the gears as they sought to turn, a reminder of an existence beyond the watery bubble which they now occupied.

“I do not know,” said Optimus, after several moments of contemplation. “Not precisely anyway. I should suppose...that may be up to the two of us.”

“How so?” said Megatron. “That we should go back and continue our quest to rip out each other’s sparks?”

“Your quest,” said Optimus, with a touch of steely disapproval. “Of the two of us, only one of us has ever actually attempted that maneuver.”

“For all the success it had,” said Megatron. “Or what other option do we have? Live in your corpse hut on the sands of a strange land until we rust away with the sun and the salt and our dissolving frames mingle forever among the waves.”

“_ Let us go to another country _ ,” quoted Optimus, half absently. “ _ Not yours or mine, and start again. _ ” 

“_ The rest is understood. Just say the word. _” Megatron dug out a fistful of sand and tossed it fitfully into the air, sending a shower of grains raining over them both, like a strange parody of the wet energon with which a newly committed couple would be sprinkled, in the eons when it was traditional to shed blood at such affairs. “Whiplash, if I recall.”

“In his second collection,” said Optimus. “Published before the founding of Kaon.”

“If you think I am willing to go back to Cybertron in chains—”

“I know you better than that,” said Optimus. “And you know me.”

“I do,” said Megatron, after a significant pause. “And I know that you would sooner stay here and feast on dead flesh and bathe in salt water and roast in hot sun than return to the land from whence you came.”

Optimus snorted derisively. “Always so squeamish. I would have thought that having known true hunger would have helped you put aside such niceties.”

“I would eat _ uncrystallized energon _ before carrion.”

“It is not so bad once you get used to the stench.” Optimus glanced sidelong at him. “Are you telling me you did not try it once on your way here?”

Megatron looked a shade sulky. “Well there _ wasn’t _ any uncrystallized energon here, was there?”

Optimus laughed softly. “I suppose not.” He stretched, his tentacles squirming around and under him in a wriggling mat. “And there are worse things than eating rotting flesh.”

“Like being locked in the sterile field of a Net, drinking tasteless provender endlessly, to function another pointless cycle?”

“Half-sick of shadows,” said Optimus, very quietly.

“You were not made for the archives,” said Megatron. “For the featureless, regimented streets of Cybertron. For places of darkness.”

“To the contrary,” said Optimus. “Sometimes I think I was made for only that.”

“Fool,” snapped Megatron. “Only you would lie here, looking like an eldritch monster king from a distant galaxy, come to ravage and conquer, and contemplate how you might have been made for the _ archives _.”

Optimus raised an orbital ridge, but did not turn to look at Megatron. “Interesting you should phrase it that way. You know, I am fairly certain I read that very tale, unfinished, in that datapad you left behind on my console after we had attended that match with Borer…”

Megatron’s optics widened in outrage. “You said you hadn’t read that!”

“It was entirely endearing, I assure you,” said Optimus. “I did not tell you because I hoped against hope that you might finish it.”

“I did,” said Megatron, a hint of what might have been glumness in his tone. “Or rather, a draft of it. Soundwave indicated it was an affront to both grammar and good taste and pitched my only copy out an airlock.”

“A wise choice, it would have been rather awkward if Starscream used your own fictional endeavors as an exhibit in your trial for treason.”

“I had not committed treason,” Megatron grumbled. “Not _ then _ anyhow. Not that stopped him from accusing me of it every decacycle or so.”

“A pity, think of all the wasted millennia we could have spent committing it.”

“At least it would have served to diffuse some of the stress of dealing with him,” said Megatron. He shifted on the sand. “And what about you? Are they going to make you preside over your own fraternization trial?”

“Well,” said Optimus, feeling out the shape of the words. “We could always do some legwork ahead of time.”  


“Legwork?” said Megatron.

“To render it not fraternization.”

“Simply diabolical,” said Megatron. “I like it. You might actually kill Ultra Magnus with shock.”

“I thought you might appreciate the chaotic potential,” said Optimus. “Of course this all begs the question of whether we can establish acceptable parameters from which to negotiate.”

“Wrong,” said Megatron, flat. “It begs the question of whether we can even escape this wretched planet.”

“You truly consider it wretched?” said Optimus. “I find it speaks to something deeply buried and unquantifiable myself.” He cocked his helm in Megatron’s direction. “Besides, you are on it, so it by definition cannot be all bad.”

Megatron looked away. “That is, without a doubt, the _ worst _ compliment you have ever attempted,” he grumbled. “Is this some aft-backwards means of proposing that we stay on this sand heap forever?”

It _ was _ tempting. It seemed so easy, to slip away amongst the shoals and vanish into the vastness of the galaxy. Optimus knew better than to think that they wouldn’t be missed, but perhaps they’d be believed deactivated? Eventually the amount of resources and time required to search them down would prove prohibitive. Perhaps their respective sides would find their way to peace of their own volition, and relegate their memories to no more than a distant nightmare of an ancient war, as it should be.

Then again, could they really assume that it would play out thusly? Could they really assume that Soundwave, that Ratchet, that Ultra Magnus would give up and stop searching for them before they could retrieve them or confirm deactivation?

Optimus sighed. “I do not believe that to be an option.”

“It is our _ only _ option, in case you have not noticed,” said Megatron. “Unless you are storing an escape shuttle somewhere underneath all those.”

“I am flattered you were so impressed by the size,” said Optimus, dryly. “But I am afraid not.”

Megatron threw another handful of sand at him. “Cretin.”

“Undoubtedly.” Optimus sighed deeply, his mouth turning down slightly at the edges. “I do believe however, that I have a means through which we might signal for help.”

Megatron sat up, scattering sand everywhere. “Is your commlink repaired?”

“Not...precisely,” said Optimus. “But I concluded during some...self-exploration, that I might have access to an expanded sensor array.”

“..._ self-exploration? _”

“Not as you are thinking,” said Optimus, peeved. He sat up slowly, allowing his tentacles to uncoil out from behind him, spreading from an entwined mat into a wide and writhing crown.

Understanding dawned on Megatron’s face. “Secondary processors,” he breathed.

“Indeed.”

“You were sitting on our ticket out of here the whole time, and you chose to frag me with those instead of signaling for help?” said Megatron, incredulous. Consternation crossed his expression. “You...had a means to contact rescue, and you chose to stay instead?”

“I could not but do it,” said Optimus. “I could not bring myself to leave while there was a possibility that you still functioned.”

“Soft spark.”

“The softest.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” Megatron shifted closer, reaching to touch the roots of the tentacles where they sprouted from Optimus’s dorsoventral plating. They waved drunkenly, dipping around him, touching lightly against his own armor.

“A small, perhaps practical problem,” said Optimus. “I am uncertain of my ability to muster sufficient power to overcome the ionosphere and send a distress signal to the proper channels.”

Megatron stared at him. “Now, _ that _, truly is the worst pickup line I have ever heard from you.”

“Pickup line—”

But Megatron had already grasped at his pauldrons and was in the process of maneuvering himself practically into Optimus’s lap. Optimus flailed and, back heavy as he was, nearly overbalanced into the sand.

“Megatron—”

But then Optimus found his speech suddenly strangled, dead in his vocalizer, because Megatron had withdrawn the curved halves of his chest plating and exposed his spark.

“Up to you, Optimus,” said Megatron. “You, who have never failed in kindness.”

“Sometimes failed,” said Optimus.

“As we all have,” said Megatron. “It simply remains to be seen if we can transcend our failures and rise to meet the new dawn. Just give the word.”

And Optimus gave him three.


End file.
